A Croatian curator of Institute for the Research of the Avant-garde  Zagreb, Branko Franceschi and HDLU in collaboration with David Zwirner, London, present an exhibition of new work by Belgian artist Luc Tuymans. The exhibition, titled Allo!, brings together six new paintings and a series of wall paintings especially conceived for the rotunda of the Mestrovic Pavilion. Painting from pre-existing imagery-photographs, film-stills, newspaper cuttings-Tuymans’s works address the elusive gap between memory and reality, personal space and public space. (10 May – 21 June, 2012)

Tuymans’s new series of paintings is inspired by the final scenes of the 1942 black-and-white film The Moon and Sixpence, which was adapted from the 1919 novel by W. Somerset Maugham. Loosely based upon the life of Paul Gauguin, the movie ends weeks after the death of Strickland, when his doctor travels from London to the village in Tahiti where the main character lived. When the doctor enters the painter’s cabin, the movie changes from black-and-white to Technicolor. Tuymans made a series of screenshots of this color metamorphosis. The photographer’s reflection-that of Tuymans himself-can be seen in the screenshots and therefore also in the paintings.

Born in Mortsel, near Antwerp, Belgium in 1958, Tuymans studied fine art in Brussels and Antwerp between 1976-1982, before completing a degree in Art History at the Vrije Universiteit in 1986. In 1992, he participated in the prestigious Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany, and he has since exhibited widely in Europe and Northern America.

Source:

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